Percy Bysshe Shelley - Queen Mab (1813)

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War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nile shall pursue his changeless way: Those Pyramids shall fall; Yea! Not a stone shall stand to tell The spot where on they stood. Their very site shall be forgotten, As is their builder's name.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds Of high resolve; on fancy's boldest wing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The same means that have supported every other popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I know The past and thence I will essay to glean A warning for the future, so that man May profit by his errors, and derive Experience from his folly; For, when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory...

Percy Bysshe Shelley
As belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief;...

Percy Bysshe Shelley
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,
All earthly things but virtue.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Percy Bysshe Shelley